It came to my attention tonight that the old Webshots site has been closed and all the photos deleted.  So all the links on this blog to those photos are now broken.  Ick.  As I'm able I'll try to repost those on another service and restore the blog's illustrations.  Sorry about that...

Work goes on apace.   If you want to see more up to date pics and recent progress I usually post pix on Facebook these days.  Contact me through here and I'll be glad to friend you there.

Fall is upon us!

Does this mean we've fallen and can't get up? Not quite yet, thank Heaven... :)

I guess most of my "updates and progress" have been on Facebook this summer so I haven't posted much on here. If you're my friend on there, drop by to look at the photos there. If you're not a friend there yet, drop me a note and I'd be happy to hook you up there.

You can also try these links to some of the pix there.

Barn beginnings pix

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=459346&id=587870580&l=1985fdac44

Barn progress pix

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=468767&id=587870580&l=7bd0ced37f

General Summer pics

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=436545&id=587870580&l=6340b5fc07

In summary, this summer has seen a good bit of progress. There has been a further "taming" of the grounds around the house. I built, wired, insulated, drywalled and painted an office in the barn where we can run the rest of the project from. Sal has her desk and papers strung out along one wall, and I have the other side with the "house project" computer set up. In between are the computer for my school stuff and some large bookcases with building info stacked up on them. And a table large enough to spread blueprints out on.

I've done a lot of work in the yard to beat up rocks that had been beating up my mowing equipment. It's been oddly therapeutic to take a sledgehammer and make little rocks out of big rocks. I have a lovely rock "infill" going near the trailer in the back of the property, the foundations of a roadbed to the back part of the land. I've learned that the rocks have a particular grain to them and if you whack them just right what seems like an immovable object will often shatter into gravel a lot sooner than you might expect. Something of a life lesson there, for me at least.

The latest amusing aspect of things has been our continuing quest to get Internet access to the property. Since I finished the office and got the computers set up I'd decided to go with a Comcast connection. There's no DSL out our way, so the only other alternative was wireless and I wasn't fond of that option. After a month of dealing with some VERY nice people, none of whom seemed able to talk to one another or understand my need to hook up to the BARN, not the HOUSE, I cancelled the order. I'm not sure what I'll do now, but I was hugely disappointed that they just couldn't seem to pull it together. The right hand (installers) never could get it together with the left hand (construction) and neither seemed to be talking to the head (customer relations). Ugh.

In the "amazing answers to long awaited prayers" dept. we had a crew of fellows come through who wanted to clear the phone lines in front of our house. I had cut down 30+ trees (with the help of friends) which had grown up around these lines, but there were seven that had grown -between- the lines and I couldn't cut them with the equipment I had on hand. These guys had a bucket truck and a chipper. Yeeha! They cleared the lines and cut down stuff that they didn't strictly have to, as a favor to us. We let them dump three truckloads of chips in our yard and we were glad to get it. They told me that the company often has to pay to get rid of them. Yikes! (This morning I went out to feed the dogs and the piles were steaming. I put my hand on top and it was actually hot on top of the pile. There is an opportunity in this if I can figure out how to exploit it. :) So, the "top" line is that we got about $700 worth of tree work done for free. As they were leaving I learned that they will be back in a few weeks to install a FIOS line down our street and expect it to be operational sometime before Christmas. So I'm going to wait and see what develops on that score. If I understand the options rightly, they'll give us TV, Internet and phone bundled for about what Comcast would have done for just Internet. Not a bad deal if it works.

The big push now is to get the permits all squared away so I can get the addition up and closed in before the snow flies...

Well, that's about it for now. Back to work at school.

Buried treasure

When you go digging in this yard, you just never know what you'll find. :)

The past few days I've been digging a shallow trench from the fence row to the trailer to run an electric cable underground. I have 1.5" Sch.40 PVC pipe down about six inches with a heavy duty electric cord through it. Along the way I discovered an old concrete fencepost hole. The post has long since rotted away, but there was the concrete "plug" right smack in my path. I bit the bullet and dug around it and got it out of there but it put a bit of strain on my back I'm afraid. Nice to have reliable power to the trailer though. I ran the battery charger today, then played the radio and plugged in some lights as I finished up the job. Felt good to have my hands in the dirt as I "re-sodded" the trench and blended it into the lawn around it. In a week or so I'll scatter some seed and some grass clippings over the area and it'll be hard to tell what's where. It was hard digging since there were several trees nearby and their roots were in the way, but it'll make mowing a breeze and there's no way to damage the electrical cable now. Before it ran across the grass and you had to disconnect the trailer and roll up the wire each time you passed through that area.

Speaking of mowing, since I last wrote I've discovered that Eloise needs a trip to the repair shop to get some freeze plugs replaced. Apparently I didn't add enough antifreeze to her in the fall and they popped out sometime this winter. :( Of course, they're on the back of the block, facing the front of the transmission housing. Why not put them on the outside where they could be replaced easily?? Darned if I know. But getting to them basically means splitting the tractor in two and that's more work than I have time for right now. So hopefully next week I can borrow a trailer and haul her over there. The grass is going nuts with this warm weather and sunshine we've had lately.

The past few days I've done a bit of few hours of mowing with the walk behind mower each day, just so things don't get too far ahead of me. I used the bag for the clippings so I could spread them on some bare dirt areas around the place. Hoping they'll "rot in" and provide the medium to let the grass fill in those areas. At least my boots won't get so muddy walking over those areas now. At the rate things grow around here I'm sure that as soon as we start gardening in earnest we'll never starve. :)

Speaking of gardening, I have been reading about stray bale gardening and decided to try it since I had eight straw bales left over from a "hay ride" a few years ago. You're supposed to water them for three days straight so they get soaked with moisture. The last few days. I'd been doing it the hard way, with a spray nozzle and the pressure turned down so it soaks in. Today I took some time and hooked up a length of soaker hose that my brother-in-law gave me out of his garden. (They're moving to a retirement apartment so I got a few helpful things out of his garage before the new folks took possession. :) The soaker hose at full pressure probably draws more water than my shallow well can sustain for long, so I reduced the pressure to about half and feel better about letting the hose run for an hour or two now. A new well is in the plan for the future but for now I want to be careful not to run the present one dry. The straw bales are almost ready for their first dose of fertilizer, so I have to remember to pick some of that up early next week. I've only got about eight bales started so far, but later I'll add four more. It's fun to anticipate growing some veggies. Yeah, I actually said that. :)

The remaining barn electrical circuits are substantially ready to be hooked up at the electrical panel in the house. Plenty of "open slots" on the panel that have been disconnected from former circuits in the house that are no longer functional. At some point down the line the barn will need a new cable strung to it and it's own sub-panel but that will come later. We'll settle for functional in the short term and worry about optimal later. :)

Framing the barn office area hasn't happened, for a variety of reasons, so I'm a little shy of storage space as we move out of the house. :( However, I remain hopeful that -most- of our stuff will not end up in the yard under a tarp. :)

We're planning on moving big pieces of furniture out on Monday or Tuesday, then the rest to be done by Thursday. I'll be away for three days this weekend with various activities so what's not done by Thursday evening gets left for the new tenants.

Well, that's about it for today/tonight. Time for dinner, shower and sleep in short order.

Hope your weekend is going well,

Doug

Cabinets delivered today! Yay! All but two fit in the house. I'd forgotten that there were two that wouldn't fit through the current doorways. So now they're blocking up my shop. :)

Great to have warm, sunny weather back!

Tired, off to bed.

Monday again, already? Kitchen cabinets and yard work.

Today was mildly productive.

Good side:

Vacuumed the whole (new) house to pick up all the random plaster dust in the corners from previous demolition. There's a little more to come down, two doorways to open up and one to be moved over, but it made me feel better. That's important. :)

Cut back the privet hedge along the driveway. If they survive and start to grow in spring, I'll cut back the rest come May. Lowered the top of the hedge to about 2' off the ground so the sun can get to the driveway and I won't have to shovel as much next winter. Maybe I can rig up some big sheets of mylar next winter to reflect sunlight onto the driveway so it'll melt faster. I never did dig out the place this winter, just waited for it to melt. It was good to be out in the fresh air. While loading clippings into my handy dandy pickup-trailer I kept feeling my foot hit something. Turns out that in the middle of the lawn there was a cut off fence post that the frost had brought up above the surface by an inch or two. REally odd. Got my sledge hammer and knocked it back down below the surface a bit. I stuck a stick down inside and it's pretty deep so I didn't bother trying to pull it out. Too much work, some other day when I get my fence post jack perfected. :)

Spent several hours picking up other trash and debris that's surfaced over the winter and recent rains. It's astonishing to me that after three+ years of picking up silverware, old cans and stray kid's toys that I'm still finding stuff. I collected about a five gallon bucket's worth of stuff. The place would be an archaeologist's dream in a thousand years but right now we're just getting rid of junk. :)

Then I got to looking at some rocks that I always have to avoid with the mower and thumped them with my big iron digging bar. I was hoping to just knock off some of the hight spots, but ... they moved! They weren't bedrock!! I pried up about six rocks and set them as the base of a (future) rock wall by a (future) water pond. Filled the holes with dirt and felt I'd accomplished something permanent. I'd never realized how rich and dark the soil there is. I'm going to have to plant some veggies there when the time is right, it looks really good.

The back of the truck had several boxes that needed to be transferred to the barn, and an air compressor in need of some repair. The boxes were heavier than I'd anticipated and I was more tuckered out than I'd thought I'd be. The air compressor is in need of more repair than I'd thought as well. :(

Actually, most of the day, I was killing time just piddling around and puttering. Because:

Bad news: Looks like the company that built our kitchen cabinets may be about to go under. They've been storing them for the last couple years and we've paid for them so I didn't want to lose them. Went over last Thursday to arrange delivery for this morning. 9:30, no truck. 10:30, no truck. All afternoon, no truck. I'm not impressed. Hope I can get these guys to bring them over here, I don't want to lose them. They're all custom and we paid an arm and a leg for them. :(

Guess I'll have to go by their office tomorrow morning if I don't hear anything early. I don't trust these guys on the phone.

Still need to tackle that electrical and framing work in the barn. Hoping to take another run at it tomorrow.

Well, that's it for now. Need to go soak my sore muscles. :)

Doug

Has it really been THAT long? Yeeeessssss....

Hard to believe that it's been since last summer that I posted here.

Indeed, winter DID come, and what a winter it's been!

Last summer it got so late and we were so far from breaking ground on the addition we decided to wait out the winter in our rental house. Considering we got about three feet of snow here, it was a good decision. Two people in a aluminum sausage in the snow would not be a good idea. Even NASA doesn't leave people alone in such a small space for that long. :)

Since I last posted the storage room is 99% done (still a little weather stripping to do around the doors, but it got us through the winter). It's about half full of junk from the house that needs protected storage, with more on the way.

We've given notice on our rental house and will be moving to the new place in about four weeks. So right now my focus is on getting things moved out of the old house and making sure there's enough storage room in the barn.

I learned last fall that the trees along the roadside are not maples but are some variety of elm. I'd love it if they were slippery bark (love that tea!) but haven't been able to fine tune it enough to figure it out yet.

The winter brought down parts of two of those trees, so now what's left can be brought down by the normal means we used last year. They're both pretty big, so that'll be a chore for a "group work day" sometime this spring. I still have several that are up between the wires and will take some climbing to take them down. These all may wait until next fall and the house is livable. If they survived the high winds and snow this winter, they'll survive the summer. :)

Gavin McLoad has been emptied of his metal junk, so he's free to be put to use for other purposes. Hope I can get him roadworthy this spring so he can haul building supplies. He has a nice new (used) tire for the flat one that I couldn't get off before. (Thanks Rick for the help with that!) He really only needs some work on the lights to get him inspected and licensed. I think. Unless Murphy shows up. :)

Current push is to finish up the office space in the barn loft so I've got a work room for plans and computers once we move into the trailer. Monday I plan to finish up the weather stripping and the electrical work on the storage room (lights in the north loft). Tuesday I want to lay part of the new subfloor and start framing some of the interior walls in the office area.

Still have to figure out some way to get Inet access to the property. Have been considering wireless or CATV links, not sure what to go with. Apparently DSL is not an option in our area. :( If you have preferences, experience or suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em.

Once that room is usable, Sal's office is the next point of attack, so we can store things in the house there. One hopes we'll be onsite soon after that and the pace can pick up.

The pool seems to have come through the winter pretty well, to my amazement. At one point this winter there was ice on it so thick I could walk on it. VERY odd. There's A LOT of water on top of the cover right now from all that snow and ice, but it's all clear and clean, not green and mean, so we may be able to just let it strain through the cover and stay put when we pull the cover off.

Saw two cardinals today as we took a walk around the place. Nice bright colors amidst the little hints of green here and there. Snow drops are up on the south side of the house, adding a bright white promise of warmer days ahead. On the front of the house it looks like some of the bulbs are JUST starting to awaken.

That's all for tonight! Hope your corner of the world is looking brighter too.

Work-a-day doings on the farm

That was the title of a book I had as a kid, about two bears that bought a farm and decided to become farmers. I remember it fondly. Now you can find it on Google Books. :)

Sometimes I feel like Big Bear Dan and Little Bear Ben. Always something to learn and do. Fortunately I don't have to depend on supplying my own food for the winter...

Yesterday I had two young friends come by to spend a good bit of their day helping out. One cleaned the Airstream bathroom and kitchen to sparkling condition.

The other worked with me cutting down more than a dozen trees along the street. We managed to figure out a system that worked VERY well. I'd put a ladder up as high as I could reach on the tree, tie off a very long rope and then notch the tree with a chain saw so it would fall away from the pool area. Then we'd use the long rope attached to Eloise to pull over the tree. We started on the end of the row farthest from the pool and worked our way closer to it.

It was amazing how well it worked. I think these are swamp maples and they're not very strong and they snapped right where they were supposed to. It's a good feeling when a plan actually works. :) Once they were on the ground we'd cut off the top branches to be burned on the brush pile, the logs I'll cut up for firewood. The brush pile is now HUGE and may have to be rearranged before we light it, it's too close to some trees I really don't want to kill.

There are four trees along the road that are still on "my side" of the phone/CATV wires. Only one is close to the pool and will need special care coming down. All the others are either grown up between the two wires or are on the other side of the wires.

The ones that are not entangled and lean over the road will require a larger crew to drop. We'll need traffic control and more warm bodies to clear the road quickly. The trees that are between the two wires will be a problem. We'll have to get above the wires and cut off that portion, then cut just below the wires to free them from the entanglement, then cut at the normal height.

For anyone who cares: the reason they have to come down is two fold. The leaves in the pool are a maintainence issue, and their entanglement in the phone/CATV lines pose a potential hazard in an ice storm. We're leaving stumps and growth about five feet tall to maintain our privacy in that yard while a new line of bushes (lilacs and evergreens) and small trees (mostly dogwood) gets started behind them. Once the new screen has grown up, we'll cut the current trees flush with the ground.

The storage room isn't done yet, but we're pretty close. All that remains is mudding and painting and installing the lights. I'm going over today to put a coat of mud on and expect to be building shelves by Monday. Once shelving is in place, we'll give notice on our rental house and things kick into high gear to get ourselves moved onto the property.

We've mounted a fan on the south gable of the barn and it does a good job of taking the hot air off the top of the barn loft.

I put in twin unpowered vents on the north side to provide and "inlet" and relieve some of the heat problems there as well. We've caulked each seam, then painted the north end to match the south end. I'm not sure when we'll get to the trim, but that'll keep for a bit. The fellows who've been working with me the last few weeks did a great job on that.

If you compare to how it looked a few years ago, we've come a long way. :)

Around the yard we've cut and widened the path up to what I call the "privy corner" so that I can manuver my "used to be a pick up truck bed" trailer (which we've dubbed Gavin McLoad, fans of Love Boat will understand) up there easier. Some debris isn't worth taking to the county dump, might as well let it rot in peace.

Gavin is full of metal debris at the moment. A friend will soon come to pick it up to recycle, I hope. It's astonishing how much metal junk we've picked up around the place. Everything from old gutters to fence wire to hot water heaters to you name it.

Sal worked very hard to get the pool up and running this year. The filter needed extensive repairs and replacements and she did a great job with it. The weather has been a little cool for extensive swimming, but it's almost August so I expect that will change at some point.

The pontoon boats are now tucked into a corner of the property that is out of the way. Hope to get them off the ground and back on wooden blocks, & covered with a tarp, soon. Nice to have that part of the yard freed up again. If you saw "Gods and Generals" you saw some of these boats. They're part of a larger collection that is a recreation of a Civil War era floating bridge, which I'm storing for a friend.

Oh, and we've gotten new blades installed on Eloise so she's back to cutting grass and the lawns look marvelous. It took forever to get the right blades once one of the old ones snapped, but we finally managed. Now I just need to return the "wrong blades" to a very unresponsive seller on eBay...

We've had a fair amount of rain through the summer so far and things are still pretty green, which is great as long as I've got a good mower! :) Fortunately, now I have both the walk behind mower AND Eloise doing her thing. I mowed up on the hillside yesterday and it was so enjoyable to tool around up there and make sure the paths stayed open.

Well, time to hit the road and get spackle all over me. Like it was with the bears in the story, winter's coming. :)